Fit for a Princess; November 2010; Scientific American Magazine; by Adam Piore; 1 Page(s)

When the animators at Walt Disney Studios first dressed up Rapunzel, the long-haired star of the forthcoming movie Tangled, and had her spin around in front of a mirror, she froze mid-turn, and the folds in her multilayered purple dress turned stiff as shells. The filmmakers had run up against a challenge that has long plagued sartorially inclined animators.

“From very early on, we knew we wanted to get more elaborate clothing than had been done so far in [computer graphics],” says Rasmus Tamstorf, a senior research scientist at Walt Disney Animation Studios Research. “But when a character wearing free-flowing, multiple layers of clothing moves, it can create a lot of contact between the different layers, especially in the way they slide on top of one another. And that can cause problems.”